There are many Native American stories regarding the stunning red, orange and white hoodoos in Utah’s Bryce Canyon National Park. The Paiute Indians call the park Unka-timpe-wa-wince-pockich — which means “red rocks standing like men in a bowl-shaped canyon.” According to one of their myths, a long time ago a group of people moved into the area and made Coyote angry with their bad behavior. Coyote put a curse on the people, turning them to stone. The canyon’s hoodoos are these Legend People.

Whether you stand on the rim and look down or hike into the natural amphitheater and gaze up, it’s easy to see the spires of rock in Bryce as stone people sitting, standing, kneeling or holding each other. Every new angle you gain and every change of light you experience reveals another scene for your imagination: a village of people, a city of skyscrapers or a world of fantastic creatures.

Given recent news headlines, however, it seems that the bad people in our national parks are not just relics of tales from the past. And the worst part of it may be that instead of people paying the price for their bad behavior, wildlife is taking the rap.

When people go bad

In July 2010, newspaper articles and TV broadcasts were overrun with stories about a 49-year-old woman and a companion who were “attacked” by a buffalo in Yellowstone National Park. The woman spotted the buffalo in a parking lot and began to walk toward it. The animal responded by charging her. She managed to record the event on her cell phone camera, and that footage accompanied her as she made the rounds of morning TV talk shows, her bruises prominently displayed in high def.

After the video was posted on YouTube, however, viewers started taking a second look and began making comments. According to several people who wrote in, it appeared that a stick had been thrown at the buffalo before it attacked. Some say there was already something on the buffalo’s head that it was trying to shake off. The footage also shows a man purposely striding toward the buffalo. It’s clear that the animal was being stressed by what could be construed as aggressive human actions toward it, and it naturally reacted.

Yellowstone National Park regulations, which are handed out upon entering the park, explicitly state that visitors must stay more than 100 yards away from bears and wolves and 25 yards away from other wildlife. It’s written that “It is illegal to willfully remain near or approach wildlife, including birds, within ANY distance that disturbs or displaces the animal.” In her interviews, the woman admitted that she had approached the buffalo to within 30 feet.

A month later, in August, a grizzly in Yellowstone National Park’s Soda Butte Campground killed a Michigan man. Just a week after the “rampaging” grizzly mauled the man to death and injured two other campers near the park, officials were called to investigate allegations that a photographer had been baiting wildlife with food just two weeks earlier. The baiting would explain why the bear kept coming back to the campground, seven miles outside the northeast entrance to Yellowstone, even after the killing.

Wildlife takes the blame

The female grizzly that killed the Michigan man was euthanized, and her three cubs were moved to a zoo in Billings, Montana. There is no word about what happened to the offending buffalo — probably only because after the incident, it was impossible to distinguish among the other buffalo in the park.

In the last one hundred years, grizzlies have killed nine people in Glacier National Park and six in Yellowstone, and those parks average one grizzly attack that creates injuries per year. With approximately 1,300 grizzlies living in Wyoming, Idaho and Montana, however, the human mortality numbers are lower than might be expected. It’s clear that most animals don’t go out of their way to harass us.

Tom Smith, a bear biologist and an assistant professor at Brigham Young University who once worked at Katmai National Park, recently reported that tourists at the Alaskan park would often tell him a grizzly had charged them. But after reviewing video footage they provided as evidence, he said he never saw a grizzly charging — just bears walking about and minding their own business. “The point is,” he told Mead Gruver, an Associated Press writer, “people can’t read these animals at all.”

It could be that, despite what recent news stories would have you believe about too much “rampaging” wildlife in our national parks, the real story is that humans are increasingly displaying bad behavior and are stressing the wildlife. Unfortunately, it is the animals that often pay the ultimate price for our mistakes.

Do you think that people’s bad behavior is causing most of the animal “attacks” on humans in national parks? Or are some individual animals just predisposed to harass us and therefore too dangerous to have roaming around?

Unfortunately for us, it seems Coyote no longer turns people into stone.

I think part and parcel of taking a trip to see “wildlife” is accepting that the animals are, in fact, wild. People have to accept that there’s an element of risk inherent in that, since the animals will behave according to their nature. This is doubly true when people choose to elevate their risk by provoking wild animals, in which case they have no one but themselves to blame for the consequences.

Do animals take the blame and consequences for the bad behavior of people? You bet !! Don”t you find that a lot of people don”t read the warning signs or they think that the rules don”t apply to them? It doesn”t matter if the information and warnings on the signs are to protect people, wildlife or the environment. Signs such as ” Don”t feed the wildlife” , “Don”t leave food out” , “Do not litter” and ” Slow down at posted animal crossing” are not obeyed. To prove my point about people reading and obeying signs just observe people driving on the highway and how many don”t obey the posted speed limits.

There has always been a human fascination with animals that are large enough to do us harm. We used to have the common sense to respect these animals and to stay out of their way. With improvements in technology (guns) we seem to have lost that sense. Recent history shows that these animals have far more reason to fear us than we them.

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